Shun the unbeliever, shuuuuuun!

Shun the unbeliever!I suppose that when one declares an unbelief in God as I did in a previous post, there’s no avoiding the fact of the matter regardless of how much I wanted the discussion to be about the consequences of my decision rather than the decision itself. The irony is that while I continue to support the Christian community in the intellectual sense, they are evidently supporting me in the religious sense in such a way that it appears to the casual observer as if there is disagreement or conflict between us. There is not. (For those of you reading this on cyberseraphic, there was a fairly lively discussion “behind closed doors” in Facebook.) The comments formed a perfect proof of the point that I was trying to make: friends past and present, my church community, rallied around to provide their love and support.

While I don’t want this series to be an intellectual discussion of theology, I will spend one post briefly elaborating on how I arrived at my present position, after which I intend to close the door on this area of discourse.

As I said in the footnote of my previous post (for the record, there is a slightly extended version on my blog which didn’t appear in the Facebook version), there is some degree of semantic trickery involved in labelling myself as an Atheist because language is not a perfect tool that precludes misinterpretation. In a sense, I absolutely believe that “god” is possible. “Aha!” I hear you say, “that makes you agnostic!” but I stand by my assertion that I do not believe in the possibility or existence of a real and present God. You can provide as many theological or apologetic arguments as you like pointing out exactly how or why I’m mistaken about this, but all that matters is that in my entire Christian life, I have been categorically unable to find God through any of my physical senses, faculties of reason, intellect or emotion, or through any of the prescribed means of “hearing from God”. Playing “hide and seek” is not my idea of a close, intimate relationship with my lord and saviour. Hence atheist.

I hope that those of you who knew me during that part of my life never thought that I was anything other than earnest in my beliefs and actions, and likewise ask you to understand and accept that I am now moving forward with the same sense of conviction and honesty in seeking out the Truth albeit in a new direction. Long as these posts are, they’re still way too short to convey every step of the personal journey that led me to the above conclusion, and it’d be just as futile to attempt to thrash it out in a long trail of comments. It didn’t appear to me in an epiphany, and I didn’t just suddenly decide to switch over one night.

As previously mentioned, my objective is to promote harmony between religious and atheist groups, and penetrate the fog of misconceptions through which the groups usually see one another.

—-

This post is part of the series An Atheist In God’s Kingdom.